As UKIP Energy Spokesman, I have stated two clear and straightforward objectives for energy policy: (1) Keep the Lights On; (2) Keep energy affordable. We shall be issuing an up-date on UKIP energy policy later this month at Party Conference. No major changes, but a discussion of the shale gas opportunity.

We need affordable energy to take households and pensioners out of fuel poverty. But equally important, we must have affordable energy if we’re going to stop driving industry and jobs and investment overseas; if we’re going to restore the competitiveness of British Industry; and if we’re going to get the industrial regeneration which this country so desperately needs.

With this in mind, we’ve backed our Polish colleagues in their Affordable Energy campaign. They’ve launched a “European Citizens’ Initiative” calling for the suspension of the EU’s climate and energy package, at least until other major economies adopt similar measures. Clearly other major economies are not about to adopt such measures, so in effect the demand is unconditional. The Initiative is still open and you can sign on at www.affordable-energy.eu. There’s a delicious irony in using the enemy’s instruments to attack the enemy’s policy.

More recently the Taxpayers’ Alliance, which does excellent work in a number of areas, not least in the climate and energy debate, has created a “Great Energy Swindle” web-site, at www.energyswindle.org. You can go on to it and key in your annual gas and electricity bill. It will tell you how much of your bill is tax. And it will tell you how much you can expect your combined bill to be by 2020. I suggest you do this while sitting down, and preferably with a glass of whisky on the desk. It may come as a shock. The average combined bill is predicted to be close to £1900.

Several different estimates are saying that we can expect our energy bills to go up by around 30% by 2020. And that’s just the result of government taxes and other regulatory measures – it doesn’t even factor in the basic wholesale increases in energy costs. Liberum Capital has energy prices up by 29%. And the House of Commons Energy & Climate Change Committee comes up with a similar figure.

Why is this a swindle? Because it’s all being done in the name of “fighting climate change”. And it’s wrong at three levels: first, with no climate change in nearly twenty years, despite rising atmospheric CO2 (a fact that undermines the IPCC’s climate models), the basic science is open to question. Second, even if we choose to destroy our economy with expensive and ineffectual renewables, it’s clear that other countries won’t. China and India are starting new coal-fired power stations at a rate of more than one a week. There are 1200 new coal-fired power station in the global pipeline. Even “green” Germany is building or refurbishing twenty-five. Emissions have come down in the USA, but that’s the direct result of replacing coal with cheaper shale gas, which Caroline Lucas hates so much.

And third, there is a strong case, which I have set out in these columns, that intermittent renewables do not in fact achieve significant emissions reductions, or significant contributions to energy generation, because their apparent contribution is largely off-set by the inefficiencies they impose on the inevitable conventional back-up.

So our policies fail at three separate levels. But they succeed in decimating our economy, driving production and investment off-shore, and creating fuel poverty. All pain. No gain.

So let’s do what the TPA suggests, and write to our MPs demanding an end to this nonsense. Let’s demand affordable energy.

Have signed and I’ll stay with climate variance or weather, the temperate planet thing. Whenever it gets to big melt up or down, we are all gone. No human preventative measures can control this planets behavior and its wider environment. What we witness is the money take on the way to some illusionary flaming/freezing future – shortly to arrive? I’d like to see payback from the fools involved which might prevent anything similar happening again. Silly thought I suppose.

The problem is that the people who are in favour of climate change (and I know several of them very well indeed0 are not amenable to common sense. They KNOW and they DESPISE people who are not as clever as them.

Yesterday on the radio, I got a taste of the future. Having ruined the electricity supply with their mad ideas, the lefties now go for the energy companies which, of course, are making a huge profit. They do not want carbon fuels because they poison the planet. So no fracking which they seem to confuse with one of their favourite words.
In other words, it is going to be a whole generation before they come to their senses. Even if the lights do go out, they will blame someone else. Preferably someone rich.

Indeed. I was on BBC 5 Live yesterday from Salford — their “Energy Day”. Ed Davey had been on earlier, weeping crocodile tears about fuel poverty and blaming the energy companies. I rebutted that, pointing out that the returns energy utilities make are comparable to the profit ratios of other large businesses. And we need them to invest in infrastructure. Energy prices are driven not by energy company profits but by ED DAVEY’S GREEN POLICIES!

Roger
Has any comparison been made between the diostribution of wind farms around the earth on both land and at sea, and the increase in rainfall parts of the world are experiencing?
Am I correct in saying that China and India are the greatest users of wind energy, they are having heavy rainfall and flooding, did this increase as the use of wind farms increased?
In the UK we did have heavy rains in Cumbria where there are windfarms on hillsides and at sea.
Of course the greens poo-poo any connection, but has there been any research carried out?
Do India and China locate them on high ground?

There has been a report from someone in China that believes that massive rainfall decrease was caused by nearby wind-farms. Most of the wind reaching the UK comes from the west or south west, picking up vast amounts of water on the way. When the wind reaches hills and mountains it rises over them and releases some of this as rain, at the other side of the hills, the wind then lowers and less rain is precipitated. What happens though when it passes over 500 feet high wind turbines? Does the wind just ignore them, or do the turbines cause the wind to rise? releasing even more rain, with less rain available to be released further on. This would perhaps explain why (at some times) Western Britain is wetter, and Eastern Britain is drier than has been in the past.

Concrete bases for wind turbines are impermeable to water, and the cables dug beneath ground to connect the turbines together and to the grid disturb and perhaps destroy the natural field drainage, which could lead to greater flooding.

From a physics point of view I think this is a red herring. The turbines are only 500 feet tall and unless they are on hilly land they are unlikely to be much higher. Most rain clouds are considerably higher than 500 feet. Secondly the turbines only move because of the wind, sounds obvious but the vortices that are created are different to say a powered propeller -which by virtue of its name has different influences.

Thirdly Western Britain has always been wetter [qualified by however long we have had prevailing south westerlies] than the east due to the Welsh mountains, the Chilterns and the Penines which act as stimulants to the clouds to deposit.

Fourthly, no matter how many wind turbines we construct they are but a tiny mosquito bite on the rainfall pattern whole body.

To many people, including myself, the effect on our economy by UK politicians’ principled’ stand on saving the planet is a no-brainer. Therefore, our elected representatives in Westminster, such as Ed Davey and many others, who pursue this subsiding of energy inefficiency must understand it. There has to be a number of drivers for them to follow it, be they ideological, mental illness or dare I say corruption. Or can it be I answered that point at the end of my first sentence?

There is no safe distance for wind Turbines, NOT GREEN, NOT CHEAP, NOT RELIABLE, and come with a very BAD side EFFECT on people and the ENVIRONMENT. there is Nothing GREEN about TURBINES. SAY NO TO WIND TURBINES.

The Cameron government is currently negotiating with offshore wind farm developers (mostly foreign) to pay them THREE times the current market price for the electricity that they generate. From 2014 the price earned by offshore wind power plants will be £155 per MWh, whereas the average price currently being paid to generating companies is £47.80. This subsidy program will cost us, the consumers, £7.6 billion per year – or £312 for every family in the UK. On top of this, tidal or wave projects will attract SIX times the current prices, while owners of the highly polluting back-up diesel generators now being installed around the UK will earn their owners TWELVE times more than the base price. According to the apparently deranged Ed Davey, these new agreements will cause average bills to fall by £166 by 2020!
These (and more) horrendous figures can all be read at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-27/u-k-to-pay-offshore-wind-companies-triple-market-rate-for-power.html